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Life's Like That with Andrea Rich

When you are a child of a mother who has to have everything done just right, you learn quickly how to get yourself dismissed from a task.

I remember purposely doing a shoddy job of an assigned task back when I was 8 or 9 in order to invoke the much-hoped-for "Never mind, I'll do it myself."

Folding clothes, ironing, vacuuming the stairs, I could do a job worthy of getting kicked out and I could go back to reading a book in my room, like I wanted to do in the first place.

Eventually, that stops working. If I didn't do something correctly, I had to do it again, and again after that, until it was done to my mom's standards.
That's how you learn to give something your best shot the first time, at least in theory.

Fast forward several decades and I'm the one making a young person do something over and over until they get it right.

The problem with that is sometimes I don't have the best way.

I recently had my son re-do some of his math homework after I checked it.

"This isn't the correct answer," I told him.

Our educational standards have advanced so far that little kids no longer have simple math work. They already have shapes and letters thrown in and are taught abstract concepts like estimating in the second grade.

(One night he had to find the perimeter of a shape and graph it. Sadly, I had to use Google to refresh my knowledge of what a perimeter was.)

He changed his answer to the estimating volume question on the homework paper based on my input.

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The next night I went over his graded papers and saw the answer I had him change marked as incorrect.

I didn't say anything to the boy, I went right to my husband.

"Look at this. I had him change this answer and it's wrong," I said. "How is he supposed to understand it if I don't understand it."

He took the paper from me, read the question, and looked at the answer. "It is wrong."

I explained how I traced a shape from a previous question that was estimated to hold two cups of liquid and cut out the shape I traced. I put it against the shape -- a photo of an aquarium -- in the next question and showed him how the container would only hold that shape twice.

"You don't move between questions like that," I was told. "Think about what it's asking you: Does the aquarium hold more than six cups?"

"I know what it's asking! The soup can holds two cups and you can only fit two soup cans in that aquarium," I protested.

"Look at the aquarium. It's bigger than the girl's head (there was a girl looking at the aquarium). So is the soup can because it belongs with the other question and isn't drawn to scale. Have you ever seen a soup can as big as a girl's head?"

Well, maybe. If you shop at a member's warehouse, and it sort of depends on the size of the girl, right?

"Don't you think estimation is not an exact science, and that this question is a little rough for second grade?" I asked.

"It might be rough for you, but he had it right until you made him change it," my husband said.

"Sometimes, Mom," the little one chimed in, "things aren't hard until you make them hard."

The next night I wanted a chance to redeem myself, but I was not invited to check homework -- dad did the checking. The paper came back as 100 percent correct.

I want to keep helping until I get it right, but I've reverted to getting kicked off for doing a shoddy job -- but this time not on purpose.

What am I supposed to do when I can't help with math homework? Go read in my room, I guess.

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Andrea Rich lives in Chambersburg with her wonderful husband, three beautiful children, one dog and one cat.